"The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometer (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo....

He estimated rare earths contained in the deposits amounted to 80 to 100 billion tonnes, compared to global reserves currently confirmed by the U.S. Geological Survey of just 110 million tonnes that have been found mainly in China, Russia and other former Soviet countries, and the United States....

China, which accounts for 97 percent of global rare earth supplies, has been tightening trade in the strategic metals, sparking an explosion in prices.

90 comments:

This will either cause or delay global warming, or bring about a new ice age. Whatever the case, there will be deviation from the perfect temperatures of 1960 or so and be, therefore, an unmitigated disaster.

============Referencing the notion that man can have unlimited population growth and "new, miracle high technology" will ensure we never run out of resources or have food riots again as long as the genius of the free market ensures oil, metal, and crops a plenty!

The only thing wrong with Malthus and Erlich is the timing of "when".

Right now, there are less countries that still export food, than there are oil exporting countries. From 1970 on, despite the Green Revolution and the successes of Brazil and India making rain forest into cropland as well as high yield crops....22-26 once food exporting nations have become net food importers as too many mouths exist for the arable land to feed.

But good news on the rare earths found for affected Pacific Rim nations! Anything that gets us off dependency on China is a good thing.

Obama does not process good news well. When big oil fields were discovered, he could have jumped on the band wagon and announced the end of the dumb idea called cap & trade. Instead, he can't stop beating his meat over green energy boondoggles.

I.E. a shrewd president like Clinton would be savvy enough to get some political mileage out of this news even if we learn later it was from The Onion.

The price of the rare earth metal Neodymium (Nd) has increased 6X from June '10 to June '11. [Now nearly 1,800,000 RMB/tonne.) This has had a big impact on everyone who has products with Nd magnets in them.

For example, my Ball of Whacks has 180 Nd magnets. As you can imagine, the price to manufacture it has gone up considerably. Soon it will be too expensive for my market.

Also, Pogo's Julian Simon comment makes me think more & more that God is behind these tech advances and discoveries. How else do you explain a planet with more and more people and better and better living standards?

How else do you explain a planet with more and more people and better and better living standards?

Here's how I explain it...

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

Seven: that quote has been going around recently and it's an apt one but it applies best to USA where we are at risk of losing our edge due to your good buddy from the south side of Chicago and his policies.

But the quote is at odds with my question re steady improvement in living standards wordlwide.

AJ -- I do think the United States is the most special and awesome country ever. I am biased. What can I say?

However, I just don't think it's true that the quote applies best to the United States. Forgive me for getting pedantic but, in my view, the world has been getting freer and freer since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, if not the Enlightenment. The fall of Communism in 1989 further exacerbated this trend.

In many ways, the United States is moving backward or stagnant in terms of freedom. Countries you wouldn't even believe -- like Sweden and Chile -- have far more supple and non-top-down systems in some areas.

The scripture lessons in Abraham's covenants boils down to the formula that God uses the Jews to bless gentiles, but He will sometimes use the gentiles to curse the Jews.

My rational self interested take from that is to love and appreciate the Jews, and to fight to restrain the C-4s influence in the world. That's why C-4 calls me the lowest name he knows, which is a Christian Zionist. That is also why he despises Sarah Palin despite her holding very conservative views on economics.

In college microbiology class we did the classic population studies plotting the growth and decline of yeast and other microbial populations. I never forgot how dramatic that is as the population grows faster and faster with no real hint of the coming crash until it is already in full blown collapse. Compared to the growth stage the decline is very precipitous - literally happens overnight.

It always comes to mind every time this subject comes up. I was always struck by how unexpected is was the first time we saw it.

To you Malthusians: don't you realize that your philosophy has been around since forever? Don't you realize that? And don't you realize that it's been wrong since forever? That's a pretty horrific track record. It's completely anti-science.

The only reason the market is so dependent on Chinese extraction is that Chinese prices were so cheap and can be again. There's plenty of the elements in currently-shuttered mines elsewhere in the world, and this discovery probably isn't competitive with re-opening those mines. The question is, if you set up a non-Chinese extraction, how long until the Chinese start dumping rare earths on the market to drive the alternatives out of business again?

It's the same thing you get with, for example, oil. If oil was actually assured to stay up in price (that is, if the Peak Oil people were actually right), all sorts of people would be making coal-to-liquids plants. The problem is that producers like the Saudis can, pretty much at will, drop the price to $30/bbl by increasing production, which will result in coal-to-liquids plants going bankrupt since they wouldn't even be able to cover marginal costs at marginal price.

What did the end of the Roman Empire have to do with a lack of food, water, etc.? Further, if it's true that the Roman Empire fell because of such a lack, why are there more people now to a power of quite an awful lot?

Your thesis is a nonstarter, Bag. There is no evidence whatsoever for anything Malthus ever said, including and and the. Moreover, as I say, people like Malthus have been saying such obviously wrong things since the beginning of time.

"What did the end of the Roman Empire have to do with a lack of food, water, etc.? "

It collapsed due to a lack of imagination - namely being able to imagine it's collapse. They believed it impossible just long enough for the damage and weakness to get irreversible. I don't believe we can die out from lack of food or resources, but I do think a large portion of the planet's population is at risk because they are so dependent on things beyond their control. Many could perish, and many could just endure major setbacks.

The history that gives you such confidence is a very short period of this planet's long series of kill offs and catastrophies.

I'm the one being scientific, and trusting the history (all of it), but you have faith. I'm fine with that, but it's not scientific in the least.

Bag -- Your argument about yeast is Malthusian to the core. It's applying the simple arithmetic laws of a closed environment to the entire, unfathomable planet and/or universe.

Now you speak of a lack of imagination, or things like weather and asteroids that are out of human control. That has nothing to do with Rome or Malthus or yeast or human population. That's merely being a curmudgeon.

My point about the yeast's demise and all the rest of it is just that it is always unexpected to the players in the game. After a catastrophe, everyone says: "well of course they should have seen it coming", but they never do.

I share your optimism, but for me it's guarded, because the odds are that something we feel secure about will surprise us. That's the record. Sometimes natural, sometimes man made, but history really does support the idea that "Pride goeth before the fall."

It would not take much of a problem in the world to kill off a couple billion people who depend on our modern very complicated and delicate systems of sustenance and protection. I don't think it will be us in the west, but a lot of people are at risk, and I think more than ever.

The Roman Empire collapsed but population didn't collapse. Life doesn't suffer set-backs, but tends to return with vengeance, which might be a warning to those who make attempts to win over life.

A lack of "imagination" is an interesting disease and perhaps we ought to be more imaginative?

Malthus offends me for lack of imagination, for viewing humanity as consumers and reproducers but not as producers nor as *imaginative* forces affecting his equations.

Life is dynamic. It's not a line graph of either death or stagnancy or growth. It moves in any direction or all of them. Dynamic, like the patterns fire make as it consumes a flat sheet of newsprint. It might be a pattern math could follow, something like fractals if we ever got smart enough to plot it, but not a line and not a flat plane of paper with vectors that say "forward" and "upward" until it drops off the edge like a dow jones crash cartoon.

The Roman Empire collapsed but population didn't collapseThe city of Rome went from over a million to 12,000. They didn't all move out to the suburbs. Athens was still under 15,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. The Greeks then started using the other hole.

Pricing information serves as your warning. As commodities become scarce the price goes up and alternatives are sought. Not all sources dry up at once so the signals have time to work.

That is why monetary policy and other interventions in the market are so dangerous. They can mask the signals until it is too late or they can make changes happen with literally no time for adjustments to be made. They can also divert resources to areas where they are wasted. Just imagine what would happen if the government started paying people to turn our food stocks into fuel. Say corn for instance.

The Brits are being treated to the spectacle of wind farms being built that each require a natural gas plant as a back-up for when winds do not blow. These plants are much less efficient when they idle so more CO2 is released. In fact more is released than is saved by the wind farms so the farms are completely superfluous and nothing but wasted resources. It would be cheaper and better for the environment just to shut them down.

Fannie and Freddie is another example of what happens when you mask pricing signals. All we did there was create havoc and made sure when the bubble burst it was much larger than it could possibly have been otherwise. If a company writes too many bad loans it goes out of business. If the government encourages and underwrites bad loans then that is potentially all companies and the entire economy going under.

If we can keep these sorts of interventions to a minimum we have optimized things as well as is humanly possible. All of the larger extinction events since man has been keeping recorded history have been of this sort. China and Russia just went through a couple recently. I worry about those recurring much more than I do running out of resources.

The problem with Malthus when it comes to the world today is that a distinct majority of the world's population has started to crest, is already cresting, or has already crested and is starting down. The two most populated countries are in the starting to crest category, and much of the non-English speaking 1st World is in the already on the way down stage (along with, I believe, the UK and Ireland).

One thing that Malthus, and his successors did not take into account is that it costs money to raise kids in 1st and 2nd world countries. The result is that populations naturally start to limit themselves and approach, or drop below, ZPG, as their economics improve.

I should also note that one reason why China, and maybe India, has done so well financially recently is precisely because of its population control, no matter how brutal it appears to us on the outside.

Why do I feel confident that even the poorest countries in the world will ultimately climb on board? Because industry keeps seeking out low cost labor markets, and as one country climbs out of abject poverty, its labor costs increase, and the new factories are built in poorer countries.

As engineering materials, the most important part of rare earth metals is the word "rare". If your new product or solution requires REMs, it had better be in vanishing small quantities, or you'll never make it to market. If somehow you do make it to market, your product will be over-priced. Then, some other clever engineer somewhere will figure out how to compete with you without having to use REMs, and your product will die. This is engineering reality. It has been, and will be forever.

REM's are for highly-specialized, low-quantity, high-performance items where price is no object. For everything else, use common materials.

Why are they rare? Because supernovas just don't make very much of them, and geological processes don't efficiently concentrate them.

There are any number of ways our civilization might collapse . . . but we already have technical solutions to shortages of every important current resource good enough to take us well into the 22nd century.

Now, might we collapse in the 22nd century? Could be. I figure we can start really worrying about that in 75 years. If, of course, we haven't already obviated it by developing further technical solutions in the meantime.

What did the end of the Roman Empire have to do with a lack of food, water, etc.?

This may be what he's thinking of:

"The decline of functioning aqueducts to deliver water had a large practical impact in reducing the population of the city of Rome from its high of over 1 million in ancient times to considerably less in the medieval era, reaching as low as 30,000"

No update on the nuclear situation in Japan, which is horrible. Let's not face that reality. Many on here were saying, calm down people. The scientists know what they are doing. No, they didn't. They didn't when the thing was designed. Or if they did, it was just a huge case of wishful thinking. Someone else on here said who's bright idea was it to build reactors along a fault line? Exactly.

Of little mention here so far is the "minor" fact that in re the discovery of all the good stuff on the arctic floor is the fact that a) Canada HAS NO Navy worth of a kid's bath-tub to protect its shoreline and economic interests and b) the Obamassiah is busily gutting the Navy even as we type, in case you hadn't noticed, with even more HUGE reductions to come. The Navy's naval weapons test center and bombing range is located at a place named China Lake, Nev. At the rate we're going that is going to prove a very prescient term as the entire Pacific AND Artic is going to rapidly become a REAL Sino-Soviet (the Russkis are on the move again, also, navt-wise, powered by oil money)"China Lake."Remember only a short while back a Russian sub planted a Russian Flag on the Arctic floor claiming much of what is, by anybody's definition "disputed territory" (Law of the Sea or no) by anybody's definition.Obama, all the little EPA Obomomites, and the left in general, is once again sleep-walking thru history. China and the Russians play for real--and both take the long view of history which, in case no one noticed, DID NOT end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Just when we will need a strong and capable Navy the most to defend our economic interests on the ocean floor and guarantee right of free passage on the open seas against a heavily-armed and aggressive competitors we will--projecting replacement construction rates for all types of vessels and ship retirement schedules--have the weakest Navy since the War of 1812.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people,...

PS: In case anyone disputes my characterization, one should mosey over and peruse a few Navy milblogs like "Neptunus Lex," "Commander Salamander" "Information Dissemination," "Steel-Jaw Scribe" "The Stupid Shall Be Punished" (all things submarine)or the USNI (US Naval Institute) blogs and go back over, say, a years's worth of posts and see just what the major concerns are in terms of readiness and combat effectiveness and force projections for the future...it is to weep..

Before anybody gets too excited, we're talking 2 to 4 miles down. At this point we can send small, remotely-controlled camera vehicles down to those depths, but the robotic technology needed to actually harvest those minerals may still be years away.

Great news but not surprising. It is the same with oil and any commodity. If prices go up, alternative sources will present themselves. So like Peak Oil, which has apparently been put off a 100 years for fracking, Peak Rare Earths are not coming anytime soon.

Until the Chinese cut us off completely, this stuff is just dirt at the bottom of the ocean with no economic viability at all. Better solution - stop wasting the stuff on Bird Chopper turbines, and car batteries powered by coal plants. (although now they say China's coal plants have caused cooling). Hey I know, how about high speed rail with coal fired steam engines to solve global warming.

Greg- I saw that report on China's sulfur- and I was not shocked to see the lead scientist, Kaufman?, seems to have more formal training in econ and public policy than real sciences. I am regularl;y amused when I hear enviro experts referred to as scientists then I find out they are socialists or green experts but not real scientists.

Well yes. In Roman times it was the grainary of the empire and heavily forested along the coasts with bears, wolves and lions aplenty in the entire coastal region--was where Rome got all the animals for the Circus Maximus. And there were major Roman cities est. in N. Adrica based primairly on that green ecology. You should tour the Roman city of Leptus Magna in Libya if you want to see a near-entact remains of the glory that was once Rome and its Imperial reach--all based on the lush forests, grasslands and plentiful wildlife of N. Africa.